Main » Israel dismantles protest shacks near West Bank village marked for demolition

Israel dismantles protest shacks near West Bank village marked for demolition

16 September 2018

Erekat, the secretary-general of the PLO Executive Committee, said that the claim about Khan al-Ahmar is not a new petition, but an addition to the case against Israeli settlements in the West Bank that was filed in May with the ICC on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, according to Haaretz.

Critics of the demolition believe that Israel is tearing down the village in order to make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

"France reaffirms that the demolition of infrastructure and homes in the West Bank, a Palestinian occupied territory, are contrary to global humanitarian law, and in particular the Fourth Geneva Convention, since they will result in the evacuation and forced transfer of populations, and the Security Council resolutions", the statement read.

Israel says Khan al-Ahmar, a hamlet of corrugated shacks east of Jerusalem, was illegally built and has offered to resettle residents 12 kilometers (7 miles) away.

It was referring to the 61 percent of the West Bank where Israel exercises full civil as well as military authority.

Israel's Supreme Court rejected an appeal last week, paving the way for demolition.

It also stressed that the demolition plan is part of the regime's attempts "to try to legalize the crimes of the Israeli occupation and its policies which are based on the forcible settlement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian residents of their land and property".

Israeli authorities, however, offered alternative sites for Khan al-Ahmar residents, but villagers say the first was near a rubbish dump and the latest close to a sewage treatment plant.

The ruling appeared to clear the final obstacle in a case that has been in legal limbo for almost a decade, pitting what Israel says is a matter of law and order against the Palestinian claims of a creeping annexation of territory they seek for a future state.

But the villagers - who have lived at the site, then in controlled Jordan, since the 1950s, after the state evicted them from their Negev homes - argue that they had little alternative but to build without Israeli construction permits, as such permits are nearly never issued to Palestinians for building in places in Area C of the West Bank, such as Khan al-Ahmar, where Israel has full control over civilian affairs.